Regions set out their IGC vision at key summit

Date: 08/05/1997

The first-ever European Summit of Regions and Cities, which takes place in Amsterdam on May 15-16, will bring together some 300 local and regional leaders from across the Union.

The aim of this Summit - being held just one month before the Intergovernmental Conference on reforming the EU is wrapped up in the same city - is to ensure that European presidents and prime ministers do not forget the interests and concerns of their citizens while they are discussing their grand visions of Europe's future.

As importantly, the mayors and regional heads will convey the message that they are well-equipped to help the EU and national governments cope with the most pressing challenges and problems facing the Union today - including the 18 million jobless, the prospect of enlargement and the move to a single currency.

“In Amsterdam, those elected by the citizens to govern their regions and cities will explain why we want more Europe, but also more proximity - two goals that are not at all incompatible,” says Pasqual Maragall, Mayor of Barcelona and President of the EU's Committee of the Regions, which is organising the Summit. “And we will speak about subjects that touch the daily lives of our citizens who, because of misunderstandings and a lack of information, are often sceptical vis-à-vis an uncertain European Union.”

The debate will be structured around a report drafted by Edmund Stoiber, Prime Minister of Bavaria, and Fernando Gomes, Mayor of Oporto. To the views of the Summit participants will be added the voices of mayors and regional heads in their own towns and cities, who will be linked to the debates by video conferences/satellite.

Out of the Summit will come a declaration with concrete suggestions on reinforcing the local and regional role as a partner with the Member States and the Union in the service of a better - and better understood - Europe.

But the Summit will also carry a warning to the EU heads of state and government: if local and regional input, creativity and experience are ignored, no policies and programmes conceived at the European level will have the desired impact.

“The attachment of local and regional leaders to European construction is especially strong and indispensable”, says Jacques Blanc, President of Languedoc-Roussillon (France) and Vice-President of the Committee of the Regions. “The regions and cities have become solid pillars of European integration, but an attempt to impose Europe on citizens according to some centralised concept would be a profound error. The direct participation of cities and regions in the European process is the best way to avoid this in the years to come.”

Besides, the regional and local leaders will argue, they have already shown proof of their ingenuity in taking on these challenges at their own levels. They have, for example, spurred job creation through a myriad of inventive local and regional schemes, set up links with Eastern and Central European regions to foster their integration into the EU well before formal enlargement takes place, and begun to examine the way they will react and ultimately benefit from the changes mandated by a future reform of the EU's Structural Funds for disadvantaged areas and of the Common Agricultural Policy.

Their role is also key if the EU is to overcome one of its biggest barriers - its notable lack of success in winning over the hearts and minds of European citizens. While the EU's basic responsibility for guaranteeing peace and freedom is not called into question, there is widespread scepticism among the public at large over the idea of transferring any additional sovereign rights to the EU. Local and regional leaders must be involved not only in developing European policy which affects the daily lives of their citizens, but also in conveying an understanding of the need for these policies to a wider, local audience which may often perceive 'Europe' as an impenetrable maze. Local and regional politicians with two feet at home and a direct line to Brussels are naturally placed as a go-between for citizens and EU institutions.

Thus would the regions help enhance European decision-making, promote transparency and improve the democratic legitimacy of the EU. They will also stand as a bulwark in defence of the local and regional identity and diversity which make Europe so rich - a wealth which will be demonstrated, gastronomically and musically at least, during a regional food and drink reception after the first day of meetings and, on the second evening, a concert of songs from many European cultures presented by the celebrated Spanish opera singer José Carreras.

Cities and regions are some of the oldest political and cultural structures in many EU countries, boasting histories and cultures that have sometimes engendered passionate loyalties worrying to past and present rulers. But during much of the process of building Europe, regions and cities have been shunted aside in favour of the Member States. Only in the late 1980s did they receive a weak voice in the Community's institutional process. This was followed by the creation of the Committee of the Regions by the Treaty on European Union, which gave the regions and cities an advisory voice in the making of some sectors of European policy that directly concern them.

Having tested the limits of this structure, however, they are now eager to do more to make EU rules more effective and understandable, and they want the Treaty reformers to make this possible.

Presidents and prime ministers stand up and take notice: European regions and cities are teeming with ideas that will help the EU face the challenges the Union cannot fail to overcome. Now is the time to take advantage of this dynamism.